While consumers and corporations have largely embraced the torrential downpour of new technology there is a quietly growing movement to make online communications less obtrusive. Bluetooth wireless connectivity is heralded as “getting rid of the tangle of cords on the desktop.” Flat panel monitors consume less desk space and “small form factor” CPUs are offered by every major computer manufacturer.
Palm pilots, Blackberry devices, Pocket PCs and smart phones all claim to offer mobile freedom. In reality, these devices all tether the end user to a particular hardware platform to access the information. Users must learn the intricacies of each platform before it becomes obsolete. The novelty of new technology is wearing thin. The next wave of engineering must reevaluate how humans interact with information systems. Flat panels, graphic resolutions and graphic-user-interfaces have improved visual communication, but they still require the end user to sit beholden to a glowing liquid crystal display.
What is needed is a sea change in thinking. When artists conceive of truly advanced information systems, the human-system interaction is virtually always a voice interface.
A complete voice interface must necessarily include full voice recognition independent of dialect, accents and other nuisances. Companies like IBM and Dragon Systems have marketed speech recognition software for more than a decade for desktop use and mobile devices with limited speech recognition appeared ago several years ago. Until now, such devices have largely been “speaker dependent.” In other words, they function only for their principal users and require training to recognize individual words.
Faster processors and more efficient software are enabling new speaker-independent systems that can recognize the speech of any user and require no training. These systems can discern thousands, rather than dozens, of names and are designed to work even when the speaker is in a noisy environment, such as the front seat of a speeding car.
While true speaker-independent systems are not yet widely available at the time of this patent application filing, an infrastructure may be created to wrap traditional desktop functions into a telephony interface with incremental enhancements of speech recognition as the technology fills the gap.
Telephony has been defined as “technology associated with the electronic transmission of voice, fax, or other information between distant parties using systems historically associated with the telephone, a handheld device containing both a speaker or transmitter and a receiver.” Telephony has traditionally been focused on call-center automation. Banking, billing, customer support, automated attendants are all examples of common telephony applications. The present invention brings telephony to desktop and server software applications that traditionally required manual input.